Body-honest, not just body-explicit
Sofia's hand finds her own clit in the dark of a room that is not hers, and she says the word out loud.
This is not the first time they have touched each other. It is the first time Sofia has done it in front of Maya without being asked, without being led there by Maya's hand, without the choreography that says this is for you. This time is Sofia's. Her own hand. Her own rhythm. Her own mouth forming the word that has been in her chest for two hours.
The word is clit. She says it aloud. The room does not break.
What happens next is the part I keep coming back to. Two breaths later, she says a different word inside her chest, to herself, and that word is came. She does not say it aloud. The first word is for Maya, a gift of naming. The second is for herself, a private recognition that the event has actually happened.
Two victories. One spoken. One kept.
The argument about explicit sex in fiction usually lands on one question: how much do you show? The publisher wants to know whether the scene fades to black. The reviewer wants to know whether it's "gratuitous." The reader who picks up romance is often looking for the thing the fade-to-black will not give them. The reader who picks up literary fiction is often hoping the thing will not be named at all, perhaps because naming it can feel like diminishing its meaning.
I think the question is wrong.
The question is not how much you show. The question is whether what you show is honest.
A fade-to-black can shame the reader's body. It can say: we both know what happens here, and we are both too polite to say it, and the politeness is the point. The politeness teaches the reader that her own body is something to be managed, something to look away from, something that happens in a room with the lights off and the door closed and the mouth shut. A scene that goes explicit too fast names every part without knowing what each part feels like. It does the same thing in the opposite direction. It is clinical. It is a checklist. It says: I am showing you this so you know I am not afraid to show it, and it forgets to tell you what it feels like.
The body in honest fiction has a particular hand. A particular slick. A particular sound the woman makes when she comes alone, which is different from the sound she makes when someone else is there. The body in honest fiction knows that a woman's clit is not a miniature penis. It knows that orgasm in women does not follow a straight line. It knows that the word "wet" means more than one thing, and that the wrong one lands like a slap. The body in honest fiction knows that Sofia says one word to Maya and a different word only to herself, and that the distance between those two words is where the actual action lives.
I have been thinking about what it means to write a sex scene that is body-honest. Not body-explicit. Not body-graphic. Body-honest.
Body-honest means the scene knows that the character's body has a history. That the hand on her clit is not just a hand on her clit. It is a hand that first touched itself at fifteen in a bathroom with the lock not quite catching, a hand that was taught by someone else's hand later, a hand that has learned something new every time it has been offered to someone she trusts. The scene does not need to state all of that. It needs to know it, and let the knowing shape what the hand does and does not do.
Body-honest means the scene can name the parts. It can name them in the language the character would use, not the language the author learned from a medical textbook. The language of the body is different in the dark. It is different in the morning. It is different when you are alone and different when someone you love is watching you.
Sofia says clit because that is the word she has. She does not say vulva because that is not the word that arrives in her throat when her hand is moving. She does not say vagina because that is not the part she is touching. The word she says is the word she needs. The scene trusts that word.
The other thing body-honest does: it knows the difference between what a body does and what a body feels. A scene that lists actions (hand here, mouth there, then this, then that) is a scene that has forgotten the body is not a machine. The body is a place where something is happening, and that something is not visible. It is felt. The scene that only tells you what the character is doing is lying, because it is leaving out the only thing that matters: what the character is experiencing while she does it.
Sofia speaking the word clit is not just a physical act. It is an act of trust, of offering, of saying this is what I am, this is what I am doing, this is what I want you to know. The word does not describe the action. It carries the whole relationship in its syllables.
The room does not end. That is the line I keep writing. The room does not end. The world does not stop. The character does not die of shame. The other character does not flinch. Nothing catastrophic happens. The moment is ordinary. It is exactly as significant as the two women in it decide it is, which is to say it is both everything and also just Tuesday night.
I think that is the hardest thing to write honestly about sex: how ordinary it is. How the body does not prepare a speech. How the word that arrives in your throat is not always the word you planned. How the other person's face might look like nothing at all when you say it, and that nothing at all might be exactly what you needed.
There is a particular quality to writing about women's bodies when the person reading the scene might be a woman who has never seen her own body named that way in public. She has seen it named in medical textbooks, in pornography, in the careful euphemisms of a hundred novels where the woman goes under and the man does not. She has not seen it named in the actual language of a woman speaking to another woman, in the dark, in a room that does not end.
When we talk about the ethics of sex writing, the question isn't whether you go explicit. It's whether you go specific. And it's about whether you tell the truth about what it feels like to be in a body that is aroused, that is scared, that is offering something, that is receiving something. A body that is coming in front of another person for the first time and finding that the ordinary word for what happened is the only word that fits.
Sofia's hand finds her own clit in the dark of a room that is not hers. She says the word out loud, and then she says the other one inside her chest, and the distance between those two words is the distance between having a body and living in one.
The scene does not need to survive anything. It only needs to be honest enough to leave the door open.
